“My Carlos, hear out Dmitri,” Svetlana said, then added, “Please, my darling.”
“I’m all ears,” Castillo said after a moment, and gestured impatiently for him to explain.
Berezovsky nodded. “Carlos, it is said that the Germans and the Russians are very much alike; that’s why the wars between us kill so many millions—”
“What I draw from that philosophical observation is: ‘So what?’ ” Castillo interrupted.
“—That we are either on our knees before our enemies when we believe we cannot win a conflict, or tearing at their throats when we think we can triumph. The only time there is peace between us is when both sides realize that the price of hurting the other is being yourself hurt.”
“There is a point to this, right? And you’re going to get to it soon?”
“When it was the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., this concept was called ‘Mutual Assured Destruction,’” Berezovsky went on. “And thus there was no exchange of nuclear weapons.”
“Where are you going with this?”
You know where he’s going with it, stupid!
Berezovsky started to say something. Castillo silenced him with an upraised hand, and said, “We have to take out some of their people, preferably the ones who whacked some of ours, to teach them there’s a price to pay?”
“Otherwise, this won’t stop,” Davidson said.
“Knowing something of how Putin’s mind works,” Berezovsky picked up, “I can tell you he is going to evaluate the five assassinations we know about—and I’m sure there were more—and decide, depending on the speed and ferocity of the reaction to them, whether he should pull in his horns or see how much more he can get away with before the enemy charges a price he doesn’t wish to pay.”
“Some of this is personal for me, Charley,” Davidson said. “I really don’t want to spend the rest of my life—on whatever sunny beach I find myself in retirement—looking over my shoulder.”
“Nor I,” Berezovsky said.
Svetlana didn’t say anything out loud, but her eyes also said, Nor I.
And neither do I, goddamn it.
Sexy Susan said, “CWO Leverette for Corporal Bradley, Class One Encryption.”
“C. G. Castillo.”
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Leverette’s voice said, “I’ll talk to him.”
“Go ahead, gentlemen,” Sexy Susan said.
“You’re watching the radio in the middle of the night, are you, Colonel? What did she do, kick you out of bed?”
“I understand you’ve already displeased Colonel Hamilton. You sure you want to do that with me, too, Mr. Leverette?”
“Negative.”
“I didn’t expect to hear from you for another twenty-four hours or so.”
“As I just explained to Colonel Hamilton, sir, I meant that forty-eight-hour period to mean the longest time we might be gone.”
“He’s there with you?”
“Good morning, Colonel Castillo,” Hamilton said.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Mr. Leverette has assured me that our little problem was a communications breakdown.”
“I felt sure it was something like that, sir.”
“Some good news and some bad, Colonel,” Leverette said.
“Good first. I’ve just had some bad.”
“As we speak, Phineas is taking the vehicles and a dozen shooters across the bridge. I found several Congolese officials who became very sympathetic to our desire to collect small fauna for the Fayetteville Zoo after I gave them a great deal of money.”
“Only a dozen shooters?”
“I’ll explain that when I get to the bad news. These same officials were also kind enough to rent me four outboard motorboats—not bad ones, with 150-horsepower Yamahas; they told me they stole them from the UN—at a price I would say is only four or five times what they’re worth, even in this neck of the woods. And further, to show us the place where the boats will be hidden from sight until—and I hope this never happens—it is necessary to launch them as an alternative method of leaving the Congo.
“It is my intention to use four of the shooters as guards on the fleet while the rest of us try to catch parrots—”
“Parrots?”
“—and whatever else we might happen across. Yeah, parrots. Our new friends are in the wild livestock business. They offered us everything up to and including gorillas. We settled on parrots.”
“The Congo African Grey Parrot,” Hamilton furnished, “Psittacus erithacus erithacus, is regarded as the most intelligent of the species. They bring anywhere from a thousand dollars to several times that much in Washington.”
“As I said,” Leverette went on, “our new friends somehow got the idea we’re trying to catch and illegally export African Grey Parrots. They said the birds may be found in large numbers along the Ngayu River, on both sides of National Route 25.
“They also said—I’m not sure if this is bad news or good news—that we should be very careful not to go past kilometer marker 125 on Route 25, because beyond that is where the Arabs and the bad water are.
“I asked them what the Arabs are doing in that area, and they said they didn’t know, possibly poaching elephants for their ivory, or maybe engaged in the slave trade, but the bottom line being that very few people who go deep into that area are ever seen alive again.
“The bodies of those who do venture too far, my new friends told me, are often found on the shoulders of Route 25, as far west as Kilometer 120. And I mean bodies—none are buried. Seems that some missionaries—I didn’t know until they told me that there were Congolese missionaries, black guys, who didn’t take off when the Belgians and Germans and French were mostly run out of this paradise—did try burying the dead, then suddenly came down sick and died very unpleasantly. As did large numbers of various carnivores that thought they’d found free lunch on the roadside.”
“Jesus!” Castillo said.
“Amen, brother. And, to round off this National Geographic lecture on the fascinating Congo, there are no fish in the crystal-clear waters of that stretch of the scenic Ngayu River. Sometimes, in the past, there were fish kills, but no longer. Suggesting, perhaps, one fish kill too many—”
“All of this, as you can well imagine, Castillo,” Colonel Hamilton said, “has rather whetted my curiosity.”
“—So, as soon as I hear from DeWitt that the shooters and the pickups are across the border, Colonel Hamilton and I are going to join them. We will drop four shooters at the boats, with one truck, to ensure our new friends don’t rent them to other parrot hunters.
“The rest of the scientific expedition will then drive up Route 25, which we pick up in Kisangani, to Kilometer 120. There, we’ll split into three groups. Colonel Hamilton said he can learn a lot from the bodies and—presuming, of course, that our new friends have been telling the truth—the water in the Ngayu. The other two will reconnoiter the area beyond Kilometer 125.
“This time, Charley, when I say we’ll be back in seventy-two hours, that’s conservative.”
Castillo said, “Same question: Why are you not taking the other team?”
“I’m going with my gut, Charley. The fewer of us the better. Less chance of detection.”
“Your call, Uncle Remus,” Castillo said.
Hamilton cleared his throat. “I thought you and I had discussed that unfortunate appellation, Colonel Castillo.”
Go fuck yourself, Hamilton.
“Yes, sir, we have. It won’t happen again, sir.”
“Charley, don’t call us. We’ll call you. I don’t want some raghead with an RPG and a Kalashnikov wondering who the broad with the sexy voice is.”
“Isn’t there a way to disable the audio function of the radio?” Colonel Hamilton asked.
“It doesn’t always work, sir. Watch your back, Colin.”
Of course the voice can be shut off.
Uncle Remus is telling me (a) he doesn’t want to have one of the shooters wasting t
ime sitting around the bush with an earpiece waiting for a call, and (b) more important, that he doesn’t want soon-to-be-retired Lieutenant Colonel Castillo looking over his shoulder and offering unsolicited advice.
What Uncle Remus is saying loud and clear: “Butt out, Charley, and let us do our thing.”
“See you when I see you, Charley. Leverette out.”
Castillo turned to Davidson. “Jack, is there a countdown function?”
“Seventy-two hours?”
Castillo nodded. “Put it on all of them.”
Davidson tapped keys.
In the upper left-hand corner of all the monitors, a line of numbers appeared: 72:00:00. Which a second later turned to: 71:59:59.
[SIX]
0615 12 January 2006
When Castillo, in his bathrobe, walked into the library and sat down at the table, the countdown on the monitors read 68:20:25 and continued declining.
“Les, if you can find my—and Jack’s—laptops in all this crap, how about putting the countdown on them?”
“Yes, sir.”
Bradley had come to his room and said Susanna Sieno wanted to talk to him.
“C. G. Castillo.”
“Mrs. Sieno,” Sexy Susan said, “I have Colonel Castillo for you. Encryption Level One.”
“Hey, Susanna. How’s the temperature down there? It’s ten above zero here.”
“Is Svetlana with you?”
“No. You want her?”
“No, I don’t,” Susanna said.
While Castillo was trying to interpret the meaning of that, three seconds later Sexy Susan said, “Not Encrypted Data Transmission complete.”
Castillo went to the printer as it spit out a sheet of paper.
“The morning newspaper was just delivered,” Susanna Sieno said. “Read that. There’s more. Alfredo heard about this around midnight, and has been working on it since. He just came here.”
Castillo glanced at one of the monitors and saw that “here,” according to a flashing lightning bolt and a three-dimensional image, was Nuestra Pequeña Casa in the Mayerling Country Club in Pilar.
The printout he held in his hand was a scan of part of the front page of The Buenos Aires Herald:
RUSSIAN DIPLOMATS MURDERED NEAR EZEIZA AIR TERMINAL
From Staff Reports
Officers of the Gendarmería Nacional discovered shortly before midnight the bodies of two Russian diplomats, later identified as Lavrenti Tarasov and Evgeny Alekseeva, in an automobile of the Russian embassy parked just off the Autopista Ricchieri approximately two kilometers from the airport entrance.
According to a spokesman for the Russian embassy, Tarasov—the commercial attaché in the Russian embassy in Asunción, Paraguay—was apparently taking Alekseeva to the airport, where Alekseeva had reservations on the 10:35 p.m. Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, Germany. Both had been in Argentina participating in a diplomatic conference.
Comandante Liam Duffy of the gendarmería, the first senior police official on the scene, told The Herald that “at first glance, pending full investigation” it appeared to be a case of mistaken identity, that the diplomats were mistaken for drug dealers.
“From the condition of the cadavers,” Duffy said, “it would appear that they were fatally shot with shotguns, this after both had been wounded several times with a small-caliber weapon, probably a .22, in the knees and groin areas. Inflicting this type of excruciatingly painful, but not immediately lethal, wound is almost a trademark of the [drug criminals] to get their fellow scum to talk.”
The murders recalled the still-unsolved murder of the U.S. diplomat J. Winslow Masterson, who was found shot to death on Avenida Tomas Edison in late July of last year.
Comandante Duffy said that while the most thorough investigation would be conducted, he had “to say in candor” that he doubted very much that it would be any more successful than the investigation into the Masterson murder had been.
“When these faceless, cowardly rats of drug dealers go back into the sewers, only good luck ever sees them get what they so richly deserve,” Duffy said.
Alfredo Munz, despite what Susanna had said, didn’t have much to add to what was in the Herald story, except to put in words what had been pretty obvious as soon as Castillo had read the story: that Duffy had learned that Alekseeva was going back to Europe, which meant that Tarasov was going back to Paraguay, and Duffy just wasn’t going to let that happen.
Castillo told him thanks and broke the connection.
How the hell am I going to handle this?
“Les, print some copies of that story and pass them around, please,” he said, then he pushed himself out of his chair and headed for his bedroom.
“Svetlana, sweetheart.”
She opened her eyes and stretched.
“I’ve got some bad news, baby.”
She sat up.
“Duffy went off the deep—”
“Is that it?” She snatched the story out of his hand before he had a chance to reply.
After a moment, she said softly but matter-of-factly: “And so I am now the Widow Alekseeva.”
Castillo didn’t say anything.
She swung her legs out of bed.
“Pray with me, my darling,” she said as she knelt next to the bed. She saw the look on his face. “Please, my Carlos.”
She bent her head and put her hands together.
Shit!
Castillo, more than a little awkwardly, knelt beside her and put his palms together.
He glanced at Svetlana. Her lips were moving, but no sound was coming out of her mouth. Twice she crossed herself.
So what am I supposed to pray for?
“Thank you, God, for letting Duffy take out my lover’s husband”?
Or, “God, I hope you didn’t make him suffer too long between Duffy shooting .22-rounds in his balls and finishing him off with the shotgun”?
Damn, I am indeed a prick.
Oh, Jesus, why didn’t I think of this before? “Dear God, please make this as easy as possible on Svetlana. She’s really a good woman, a good Christian, and she’s going to blame herself for this. If you want to punish anybody, punish me for not being able to get that cold-blooded Irish bastard to back off.
“Let her really be pissed at me, just so long as she doesn’t blame herself. She’s sure as hell going to get into the sin thing, because we’ve been sharing a bed while she was still married, and will decide that this is her punishment.
“Well, lay that on me, too. She didn’t rape me. It just happened. I take full responsibility. Let her be really pissed at me. I probably deserve it, and after a while, maybe she’ll come around. Just make this easy on her.
“I’ll even take the blame for the other Russian Delchamps whacked in Vienna. I should have seen that coming and stopped it.
“Just be good to Svetlana, Lord. Amen.”
Svetlana stopped praying and got to her feet. More than a little awkwardly, Castillo stood, too. She touched his face and kissed him.
He held her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t be silly.”
“What did you pray for?”
“Evgeny’s soul,” he lied.
Where the fuck did that come from?
On top of everything else, I’m lying through my teeth.
Add that to my demerits list, God.
“Me, too,” she said. “But mostly I prayed for us.”
“For us?”
“Evgeny knew the rules.”
“Excuse me?”
“He knew them, and I know them, and you know them. I prayed to God to excuse us from them, my Carlos.”
What the hell is she talking about?
“Saint Matthew,” she went on as if reading his mind. “When the Romans came to arrest Jesus Christ, Simon Peter drew his sword to protect him. Our Lord told him to put it away. ‘For all those who take up the sword perish by the sword.’ You never heard that?”
“Now that you mention it
. . .”
“I prayed to God that he will excuse you and me from that, my darling. It might not hurt if you did the same thing.”
She kissed him quickly on the lips, then gently pushed away from him. She announced, “I’m going to have a shower. You want to go first, or after? Or . . . ?”
“Or,” he said, and followed her into the bathroom, shedding his West Point bathrobe en route.
[SEVEN]
2130 12 January 2006
“Major Miller for Colonel Castillo,” Sexy Susan announced.
Castillo looked up at the monitors from the playing cards he held. The countdown timer read 53:05:50, and there was a flashing lightning bolt above a picture of the house in Alexandria.
He looked across the table at Dmitri Berezovsky and Aloysius Casey, then back at his hand: two aces, two sevens, and a nine.
“I think you’re bluffing, Aloysius,” he said, picking up chips and tossing them in the pile at the center of the table. “Your two dollars and two more.” Then a little more loudly and officially he said, “C. G. Castillo.”
Sexy Susan said, “I have Colonel Castillo for you, Major Miller.”
“How they hanging, Gimpy?”
“Montvale’s looking for you, Charley.”
“So, what else is new?”
“He just called here on the White House secure phone. He asked me if I knew where you were.”
“To which you responded?”
“That you were at the moment out of touch. And then he said, ‘Where is he, and don’t tell me you don’t know,’ to which I cleverly responded, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to say exactly that, Mr. Ambassador, sir.’ ”
“Why do I think that didn’t end your little chat?”
“He said it was urgent that he speak to you, and please have you call him; he has to talk to you about Vienna.”
“If I call him, since the sonofabitch owns the wiretappers in Fort Meade, he will know where I am. Let me think about it, Dick. I’ll call you back.”
“Figure something out, Charley. Or he will change that ‘locate but do not detain’ on you to ‘put the bastard in chains.’”
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